if you know me you know i'm ride or die indie, but i have played dnd a couple times, and it did notably form my first experience with tabletop rpgs. in the wake of the adventure zone's big popularity surge i tried to find a group in my college's rpg club and wound up in a campaign that produced the single best moment i'll ever have in a dnd game, and frankly the reason i don't really need to go back to the game at all.
we were a group of four who'd come together at the rpg club, and we'd been playing for a couple months when this happened. these people were all mostly strangers to me, and as a girl who was kind of mid-transition i was doing my best to feel out the relative queerness of the others in the group, and i was getting kind of a vibe but i couldn't be sure of anything, y'know?
so, our characters: i am playing an elvish/human warlock gal called rook and one of the other players is a tiefling druid woman called justine. early into the campaign rook and justine died and then got resurrected by a devil or something—i don't remember the details—but the point is that whoever did it basically told us "yeah dogs that's it for you. you go down again and you are not coming back."
so we're traveling through some caves a couple session later, and we wind up in a fight with some slimes or oozes, and justine, of course, goes down.
i've been playing rook as kiiind of interested in justine, partly because justine's player is the one pinging me as the most obviously queer, but there's been nothing concrete aside from a kind of desire for rook to be closest to justine out of anyone. the rest of the group is a wizard and a rogue, and i'm a faerie warlock, so we have no access to healing and no access to resurrection. but i look at the DM and say "can i just like, beg my warlock patron to bring her back?"
he acquiesces. i pick up the d20 and prepare to roll.
do you ever have those moments where you just know something's going to go your way? where you have an entirely undeserved and unjustified confidence that life's going to turn out like a story?
i drop the d20 like it's nothing, wholly unconcerned about rolling poorly, and get the natural 20.
the rest of the table loses their collective minds. i pull off the resurrection, and the DM has to take a fuckin break to process the fact that we just slingshotted this druid back from death. he walks out and i turn to justine's player like "okay so we have to do this, right? this is a romance? like we have to do this." we never ended up finishing that campaign but we did let those characters grow close in the time we had.
now, here's the part of the story i've never told before: dice are physical objects.
tabletop rpg players develop a lot of superstition around dice: the idea that you can "get the bad rolls out" and then be rewarded with good ones, as if the dice have a lottery that started out with a perfect even distribution, or the idea that some dice are cursed or malicious or etc etc etc. i do not usually subscribe to these, but the ones i come closest to are the idea that changing either the dice or your rolling surface may impact your roll. this is because, again, dice are physical objects.
this means that you can take a d20, hold it so that the 1 is closeish to the bottom of your hand, drop it without much rolling, and be much more likely to get a 20. there's still some amount of variance because it's hard to drop a physical object with exactly the same amount of force required, but no physical object is a purely random thing. until your dice start bouncing and the chaos theory kicks in, their behavior is actually fairly predictable. play it like i did, and suddenly it seems like you can manufacture luck out of sheer confidence.
i think it is worth remembering how much of our world is physical. people say this often about computers and the digital, that a lot of what we think of in abstract terms is truly a physical thing hidden from the observer: "the cloud" is other people's computers; downloaded data is represented by actual switches on a storage drive in your machine, etc. i remain delighted by the fact that luck, too, is concrete, even if it's not always immediately obvious how
